site.btaEx-Caretaker Interior Minister Demerdzhiev Charged with Mismanagement

The Sofia City Prosecution Office has charged a former caretaker interior minister with mismanagement worth BGN 1,482,218, the institution said. The crime was committed on June 2, 2023.

Ivan Demerdzhiev was caretaker interior minister until June 6, 2023, according to BTA's Reference Department. Pre-trial proceedings were initiated on January 16, 2024.

Having analyzed the evidence, the supervising prosecutor found reasonable grounds to believe that the case involves mismanagement in particularly large amounts, constituting a very serious offence.

The prosecution service claims that on June 2, 2023, the caretaker minister failed to exercise sufficient care in managing the property entrusted to him by signing a document to increase prices for activities subject to a contract for the development of a Bulgarian ID system. This violated the Public Procurement Act and the Ministry's internal rules for public procurement management. The price increase did not follow a methodology approved by the government. There was no draft document prepared by a legal expert from the Interior Ministry's Property Management and Social Affairs Directorate, and no market research was done on the pricing of the contract activities by certified evaluators. This caused detriment to the amount of BGN 1,482,218.

The former caretaker interior minister was charged with the crime ten days ago. He was set BGN 10,000 bail.

In a response to the statement of the prosecuting magistracy, Demerdzhiev wrote on Facebook Friday that "when you expose the influence of MRF – New Beginning’s Delyan Peevski in the Interior Ministry and the cover-up around smuggling, and when you force him into silence, unable to answer even the most basic journalistic questions, he reacts in the only way he knows how: by unleashing his attack dogs through the institutions he controls".

"After his [Peevski’s] minister Kalin Stoyanov proudly posed with the new ID documents, which helped us get into Schengen, someone suddenly decided that signing the contract had violated the law. The contract had to be adjusted due to the long delay between submitting bids and actually signing it, caused by ongoing court battles. Interior Ministry departments worked for nearly six months to finalize this, and the result was cheaper, much more secure ID documents for Bulgarian citizens," Demerdzhiev reacted, noting that the contract was pre-checked by the Public Procurement Agency at his request, and its legality was confirmed.

"If there’s mismanagement here, which I firmly deny, then it was committed by the person who made the payment after deciding the contract was suddenly illegal," Demerdzhiev added.

Demerdzhiev had a clear message for Peevski and what the former caretaker minister calls Peevski’s "bludgeons": "If anyone thinks this will shut me up, they clearly do not know me. On the contrary, I will keep exposing all their shady deals and illegal actions, and I will keep urging civil society to stand up against them. Because in a state run by its citizens, those sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act for grand corruption do not get to run the country or its institutions – they get investigated".

Commenting on the case later Friday, President Rumen Radev defended Demerdzhiev. "Mr. Ivan Demerdzhiev was a very good interior minister, and I have no doubt he will defend himself properly against these attacks," Radev said.

"I get the sense it will be hard to forgive him for bringing attention to the case involving the Plovdiv police officers, a case that was brutally silenced in Parliament with thumbs down, as if it were not a legislative body but a gladiator arena," the President added.